... at my office. I was pleased to discover that a few other people have connected. OTOH, I am not using encryption and this does mean that someone could read my internet traffic.

I'm trying to think how bothered I am about this. Anything like a credit card transaction will be encrypted via https, so I guess it comes down to whether I care about the small chance that someone might e.g. read my email. But then, that could happen already - using a wireless link just makes it a bit easier.

2. "notes" in the properties dialog. As you can't see these or search on them directly, they strike me as pretty much useless. If I want to make notes about a file, I put them in the filename.

3. emblems. Anyone actually use these?

4. "empty wastebasket", unless you are actually in the wastebasket.

5. The "start here" icon. Or the "computer" icon. I don't mind either of these, but I get the impression they haven't really been thought through. What is the "computer" meant to represent? Why "start here" when I never do?

6. The "overflowing" wastebasket - unless you are literally running out of space on disk. Don't make my desktop look untidy unless it is!

And some positive suggestions:

I really like the fact that the Windows property dialog shows properties appropriate to the thing represented - for example, clicking "properties" for the Network Neighborhood icon gives you network properties. That would be nice to have in Gnome too - e.g. "computer" properties would tell you about your computer.

I want a quick search bar in the file browser. Just to search the current folder and show only matching items. But maybe it would integrate with the beagle search stuff.

I tend to find that I have multiple windows open at any one time, and my taskbar gets cluttered up. It would be nice if windows which I had not recently looked at could be manually or automatically removed from the taskbar - perhaps stored in a single "more windows..." item, or accessible from the taskbar context menu.

Having a less cluttered taskbar would let me keep more applications open - I find that app startup time is a major waste of my time under Linux.

Monday, 17 January 2005

... where we went to the Hague which is beautiful and clean and laidback. (No young people.)

The new seminar format (5pm with drinks afterwards) seems to have gone well. Chin-Huat gave the presentation - his paper, about the connection between ethnic divisions and one-party rule in Malaysia, was very interesting.